A brief-yet-ongoing journal of all things Carmi. You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll reach for your mouse to click back to Google. But you'll be intrigued. And you'll feel compelled to return following your next bowl of oatmeal. With brown sugar. And milk.

Pages

Sunday, November 26, 2006

Wheat, chaff and light

When you stay at a hotel, you can choose to look at it through one of two perspectives:

An endlessly mundane and eminently forgettable example of modernist "architecture" that does nothing to reflect the uniqueness of the place where it was built.

A place that challenges you to find the unique touches that set it apart from similar facilities along the road well travelled.

I think it's obvious where I stand on this issue. Choose #1 and you never give yourself the chance to learn something new about the place. Choose #2 and you just never know what will turn up.

So as I walked through the halls of the hotel and its attached conference center, I noticed the small flourishes of decoration that made this place just that much different from the other places I've been in recent months. Were they monumentally different? Not exactly. Were they still worth remembering? Absolutely.

So with that in mind, I noticed some displays of wheat in glass cases in a hallway beside the conference center. The overhead halogen directional light reflected the yellow dried grasses quite nicely. It's usually a losing battle to achieve decent results when shooting through glass, but I figured it was worth a try.

While I didn't have the time to capture these as I zipped between conference events during the day, I had a few minutes one evening while waiting for the rest of my group, so I quickly snagged some hand-held shots. I spent as much time explaining what I was doing to passers-by as I did actually taking the pictures.

In the end, I couldn't decide which one of these three stood out. So I've posted all three of them for your viewing enjoyment. Click on them to bring up the hi-res images:

Wild grasses, Westminster, Colorado

Wheat from chaff 1, Westminster, Colorado

Wheat from chaff 2, Westminster, Colorado

Your turn: Which one(s) - if any - do you prefer. Do you believe that the ordinary can give rise to the extraordinary?

20 comments:

I like Number 3 the best. It's funny, since moving to Colordo I have been criticial of people who value their Native Grasses. Where I come from, they're called Weeds. But you've given me a new appreciation for their beauty.

I like number 3 the best - something about the gridlike texture - but then, I'd like to see more of the fluffy grass heads in it to contrast with that, so number 2 is quite appealing too - average them out and it would be perfect

I like all of them, but the close-ups capture my attention. Wheat, the seed of the staff of life. The diagonal lines in the photo show movement, even though the wheat in the cases was surely static; we can imagine it blowing in the wind. I love the crossed "hairs" between the heads and the pattern it makes.

I've been catching up on all your latest posts... I love reading your blog. You distract me from my daily demands, take me away from more serious matters, and remind me of why I like you so much. You see things through kind eyes. I do too, but don't write about it often enough, and my camera's always not in the right place or I don't take time to snap a shot.

Nice work as always. You are truly someone that is a gentle peaceful being that we all need to be in touch with more often in ourselves.